Yuxun, the Sleeping PlanetFor as long as anyone can remember Yuxun has been an apocalyptic hellscape plagued by freak sandstorms, mega droughts and collapsing buildings and infrastructure. According to geologists the arid world used to be a vibrant paradise. Back before the formation of the Clans that now dot the world the planet suffered an ecological collapse. For the next several hundred years gangs roamed the badlands or tried to put down roots before either being utterly devastated by or incorporated into the more successful Clan structure. A lack of research fails to show whether this collapse was natural or artificial and caused by a series of poor decisions by the pre-collapse governments.

The Universe Doesn't CareYuxun religion does not feature a pantheon of any description. If there were any gods of the world or the universe, the fact that nothing was done by them to prevent Yuxun's ecology from collapsing is proof enough that they are not worthy of worship. Instead Yuxuns practice meditation, meditating upon the deeds and actions of the recently deceased and the long dead for guidance in their lives. To keep themselves numb to the loss of clan members and to push atrocities from their mind they meditate upon the unforgiving and indifferent nature of their world. Those that are more philosophically inclined tend sand gardens that are destined to be wiped away in the next sandstorm or indifferent passer-by to remind them of the futility of any action they take.

This embrace of a chaotic uncaring universe has lead to the two core groups that make up a Clan: the Sleepers and the Dreamers.

DreamersWhen a Yuxu either rejects the chaotic nature of the world and seeks to mould it into their own image, or embraces it and sees as a license to do whatever they want, they are named a Dreamer. What separates a Dreamer from another Yuxu is their drive and willingness to accomplish whatever personal goal, or dream, they have by any means necessary, usually at Sleeper expense. Individual clans are prevented from internal collapse by traditions intended to rein in inflated Dreamer egos. To kill another Dreamer within the clan for any reason is to face exile in the unyielding cruelty of the wasteland. And those who share the same dream are encouraged to be allies, not competition. Those who share the same goal but who disagree on methods and execution are likewise banished to the wastes for bickering like children and are only allowed to return together after having come to terms with each other.

Modern DreamersThe first Dreamers were near full time warriors and scavengers who were expected to lead war parties against others. If their real interests laid outside of these responsibilities they were still expected to do so. It wasn't until the first new tribes and city-states were established that the clans enjoyed enough manpower to allow noncombat focused Dreamers to drop their part-time training. The ensuing Unification Wars allowed historians, doctors, and students of the STEM fields to focus full time on studying the world before and develop original technologies and methods to give their states' an edge over their competition. In the modern day the echoes of this more militant society still permeate culture with military drills and martial arts taking the place more conventional exercise routines on other worlds.

Title of DreamerThe distinction of being named a Dreamer came from rewarding those who braved the wasteland to provide for and protect the huddled masses of survivors and to inspire others to do the same. Near every clan uses a different title, such as knight/dame, master/mistress, lord/lady, to name their Dreamers, but all mean the same in context. Some clans experimented with passing on the title from parent to child, but the more common practice of awarding it exclusively to adept warriors won out in the early days of clan history. The need for experienced personnel and officers during the unification wars institutionalized the informal system of merit. Now children live as Sleepers until they show the characteristic idyllic drive of a Dreamer and are uplifted in an elaborate gift giving ceremony. The ceremony is intended to simultaneously prepare a young Dreamer and give them the tools and materiel necessary for their new clan responsibilities, and to overwhelm them with debt and obligations to the more senior members of the clan and bind them to it.

SleepersYuxu who understand reality and have numbed themselves in response to the mentally crippling truth are referred to as Sleepers. At their worst Sleepers won't even pursue getting their own food from the futility of existence until they are starving or made to. At their best they are completely functional, if lacking in personal direction. Wherever there's grunt work to be done there's likely to be a Dreamer or another Sleeper holding a whip to ensure it gets done. Far from being pure manual labor, Sleepers perform most day to day tasks in fields as complicated as medicine and surgery and draw from a wealth of experience gained since being assigned to work in their field by the clan as children. The cultural unwillingness to change the world around them has ensured that Dreamers are always on top. To them, the demands of Dreamers are just another natural hazard to be braved and endured.

Gift GivingTo understand the Yuxu and the clans they organize themselves in is to understand Yuxu gift giving. Yuxu only directly trade with those they do not trust or when a deal is brokered between two or more clans. All other transactions are given over time in the form of gifts and favors. A Yuxun may walk into a place of business and both will chat to each other about what each wants from the other. The business owner will gift the good or service to the other, and a week later will receive their desired payment. Direct transactions with Yuxu tend to be greatly overpriced to account for the loss of potential favors and the loss of a contact.

The ClansBefore the first collapse clans did not exist. They formed from the remains of military units and their more technical hangers-on and families. These groups were better able to organize against and out compete roving bands of desperate survivors and gangs. Clans rarely have a single leader and are typically ruled by a council of clan Dreamers who share the same aspirations, or at the very least whose aspirations do not conflict with each others. Clans used to operate as their own self-contained entities, which have now throughout the ages ceded their independence to an ever increasing network of alliances, favors, and obligations to each other.

Dreamers, as a rule, have what aliens consider to be inflated egos and rarely allow themselves to be totally ruled by someone else except indirectly through favors owed or directly from being the most experienced.The only exception to this is the Unifier who, through ceaseless war and social engineering, unified the clans into one cohesive polity. Unifier Mysha, formerly known as Queen Mysha to her people (further translated into Queen Sha of Clan My), maintains her hold over her people through a carefully constructed cult of personality, allowing every clan to self-govern and administer its own lands in return for gifts of resources and personnel, and by involving herself in every new Dreamer's uplifting ceremony.

Military: 4The planet has just come down from centuries' worth of near-constant low-level tribal warfare and several decades' worth of glory and prestige motivated unification wars. Though they are new to space, the Yuxu boast thousands of battle-hardened officers and warriors on par with more developed special forces units. In addition to their proven warriors and war heroes, an entire generation has been brought up within state schools in relative peace, listening to the stories of their elders, and most very eager to prove themselves in their Unifier's armies. What the Yuxu lack in weapon development they more than make up for in a comprehensive knowledge of tactics and zealous bodies.

Economic: 3While the concept of stocks and other financial products are entirely foreign to them, the entire reason their species has survived is the preservation and almost religious application of ancient engineering techniques. With large scale manufacturing being rare throughout most of the planet's recent history, Yuxu gearheads have had to make do fashioning their own replacement parts out of scrap and salvaged parts for centuries. Until major infrastructure started to be rebuilt, every clan operated its own wells and water reclamation, hydroponic bays, renewable power generators, and war machine garages. Even the youngest runts know how to patch up broken life support facilities and repair and rebuild their Dreamer owners' war rigs. The sheer numbers of skilled laborers, that treat improvisation as a rule rather than an exception, that the Clans can draw from make them a powerhouse in terms of production and repair.

Technological: 2While they have been able to (mostly) support their populations on hydroponic gardening techniques, and take gear required to live on foreign worlds for granted as a fact of their harsh existence, their technological base has largely lagged behind in the Engineering and Physics departments

Diplomatic: 3When dealing with Yuxu, alien politicians expect to deal with simple minded barbarians. When they actually sit at the negotiating table they're surprised to see a well-dressed and sharp minded liaison that treats them with the utmost respect paid to a guest in their home. When bargaining with other races Yuxu will freely give gifts and companionship, but wait for the slightest excuse to be insulted and hint that they are not satisfied before escalating to apply more overt social pressure if they feel that negotiations are going southward. Not having a weapon doesn't stop a Yuxu Dreamer from brutalizing someone they truly believe to be insolent as a way of saving face and to send a message to others not to mistake their initial pleasantries for softness.

Cultural: 3Yuxu performers and artists are every bit as passionate for their craft as their warriors are for using violence to meet their ends, and their mechanics for souping up machines for war. The subjects of their performance media tend to revolve around the exploits of their ancestors and more recent public figures. Rather than telling the story of one person’s journey with side characters, Yuxu plays, movies, books, and radio shows put a great emphasis on their supporting cast almost to the point where the main protagonist is unidentifiable unless their name is in the title. Even minor characters are brought to life in order to make their deaths and betrayals gut wrenching. A common Yuxun trope is to replace the protagonist at some point during the piece by killing them off suddenly and for the most mundane of reasons only to have another family member take over center stage.

Physical media ranges from beautiful meditative sand paintings to more permanent full body tattooing. Yuxu full body tattoos are gained over the course of a full lifetime starting when runts are given as gifts to clan historians and made into inkbacks. Inkbacks are then used to chronicle notable events on their backs that lay outside of the historian’s main interests. A historian is able to read the scenes and patterns inked onto their own scales and the scales of others as if reading from a book where others would only see intricate patterns and imagery. The difference between Dreamer and Sleeper historians is that Dreamers, upon ascension, are allowed to chronicle whatever they wish on their bodies and are typically gifted junior clan members to serve as inkbacks to detail what they don’t want to add to the ever changing narrative their own tattoos tell, while Sleepers become full body canvases for the Dreamers that own them.

Fashion, for Dreamers tends to range from practical sand protective leathers and armor to more flamboyant loose robes depending on wealth and occupation. Wealthy Dreamers are expected to dress to fit their role and will dress in the most luxurious cloths and soft leathers that they can while the more militant pack on layer after layer of light armor. Clothing for Sleepers, when given at all, ranges from the functional to the deliberately demeaning.

Last edited by Theclans on Fri May 06, 2016 11:47 pm; edited 3 times in total

No one had ever risen as high as her, no one had brought so many bickering clans together and held them together for so long. No one else had uprooted so many customs and replaced them with practices that seemed to have been there the entire time in plain sight but ignored. All to fuel her constant war machine to ensure that the vision she had for her people would persist long after she was gone. She was fine with dying of assassination in her early days. She was so sure of herself that even if all memory of her was purged there would be enough young warriors molded by her administration to put her ideas back into practice when the old clan leaders were gone. That immaterial immortality, continuing to exist by her ideas no longer satisfied her; she had to be known to the ages by any means necessary.

Mysha stared longingly at the artist's depiction of what would become her final resting place: a colossal mausoleum the likes of which never seen before. Functioning as tomb and museum, not only would she be entombed within, but so too would every one of her allies, every warrior Dreamer and Sleeper, and every enemy that she crushed. Every Inkback's hide who had tattooed Mysha's likeness would be hung like banners, immortalizing them as a reward for immortalizing her in the traditional way. However her world lacked the resources needed to fund the completion of such a project while she still lived. Other methods would have to be used...

Dressed in the her layered combat armor Mysha bashed her knuckles together like a gloved prize fighter, psyching herself up as she walked on the stage to be broadcasted by every loudspeaker and radio and to be shown on every viewscreen. She grabbed the microphone from the podium and began to speak. "We know of more wealth and prosperity than our ancestors could have collectively imagined. Our wars with each other have pushed our minds to the limit of what we can accomplish on our dusty rock of a world. The space programs of days gone by served only to fuel their nations' war machines for the good of the state. No longer! Every clan operates their own farms, nurseries, schools, moisture farms and water extractors and those that don't are rapidly improving. There is no shortage of opportunities for those with planet bound aspirations. What about the rest of us? Those of us who look around and see that every problem here is being fixed or is soon to be. What of those who have reached their goals and crave new challenges?! Every good mother provides her children with as many possibilities as she can so that they too know what it feels like to have desire burn so hotly in them that they threaten to erupt in fire if it is not met! As the Unifier, the Mother of All Clans, I look upon this world and see that it is in good capable hands and I am turning my eyes skyward with arms outstretched! I give you, my children and my future children, the eternal night sky to do with as you please!"

Yuxun may not have the resources required for her final project, but the other bodies of the solar system would yield their riches to her.

Though our people share both similar histories and racial traits, it seems our current governments are almost as different as they come. I look forward to our first interactions with each other. However, this will necessitate my species finishing their wormhole station. ^^

I like how every race so far is focused in sone way or another on religion, whether going crazy over gods or rejecting them, while my guys replaced gods with meditation and contemplation so long ago the word 'god' means 'great hero' and 'demon' means 'bandit warlord' or 'rival clan warrior we don't like'.

Still, that makes religion (or the lack thereof) a noticable element in you species' culture. I can only conclude that religion is very important for this galaxy, far more than the previous roleplaying universe.

These cultural differences will provide a catalyst for conflict in the future. For Caspoi's Great Realm of Ryleh, the Administrator was more willing to tolerate their beliefs due to there being physical proof of these beings existence. To not allow the people of Ryleh to teach people about actual knowledge and truth would go against my people's principles, and thus my character was persuaded to allow this stuff to go on as long as there were no violations of the law (things like incitement to violence and other shenanigans).

For my particular race, I also wanted to represent the wide variation between my people's beliefs, so I chose Individualist. There are definitely still people that follow the old ways despite the Conclave's extremely negative stance toward it. Going to be a lot of ethics divergence in the future, especially since things like *Encourage Free Though* for bonus research at the cost of ethics divergence will be a thing.

I am still amazed that I managed to convince you to allow missionaries considering that you are fanatical materialist, I might just have to insult people more in the future because my people were not meant to be very good diplomats.

It was your specific phrasing that helped you out, even if it was unintentional. Coming across as "teachers" instead of "crusaders" is nice. Truth and knowledge is most important, and because the beings you worship (grimace of disgust) are real and have left artifacts that can be studied, the Administrator was willing to allow this. Granted, there are definitely going to be conflicts in the future, but as long as you continue to accidentally appeal to my desire for truth and knowledge and don't start turning people into even moderately aggressive-seeming cultists, then your missionaries should be fine.

honestly, considering that the religion is mostly inspired by the Cthulhu mythos you can probably throw the last part out of the window. Still, They probably will keep calm for now. And it was not really "accidental", the star-spawn do dislike using words like "gods" or "missionaries" and prefer to present their religion as scientifically correct, for obvious reasons. It is much more easier to gain converts if you say "we worship these being that we have actually met and are of god-like capabilities" than "we worship these gods".

Anything living to be over 100 years of age is completely unheard of to the Yuxu. Current thought amongst the science ships is that what everyone refers to as 'gods' are actually great heroes who saved the galaxy at some point in the past who were so great others still regard them, but talk of them coming back is thought of as childish from nothing being able to live that long.